Tag Archives: writing

Those of you who know me know that I rarely finish a Stephen King novel. I begin with the best intentions, hungry for a good story, but Stephen King knows far too much about the enemy (and the Bible) to be playing around. His novels can cross from being entertaining to being demonic because of this familiarity.

I’m enjoying The Gunslinger because it mimics The Lord of the Rings, a little bit, by King’s own admission. I, personally, would never equate him with Tolkien. But, there are the elements of a quest through interesting landscapes, foreboding events, evil and good characters.

I’m enjoying that part.

Yet the most interesting thing to me so far is this quote I read in the foreword written by the author:

Before I close, I should say a word about the younger man who dared to write this book. That young man has been exposed to far too many writing seminars’ promulgate: that one is writing for other people rather than one’s self; that language is more important than story; that ambiguity is to be preferred over clarity and simplicity, which are usually signs of a thick and literal mind.

Fascinating! I think that he has described the difference between the American novel and those in translation with that one quote. I found Japanese literature so frustrating when I first began to read it. “What?” I thought, “there’s no beginning, middle or end?” I had been trained, you see, from the teachers at Naperville Central High School in the 1970s, not to look outside the lines. Japanese literature is more typically a “slice of life” style of writing, jumping into the moment and leaving before everything is resolved.

So I’ve been caught on the horns of a dilemma: is writing to be clear and simple versus ambiguous? I know that I have been at turns frustrated and thrilled with the ambiguity found in some of my favorite novels: Kafka on the Shore, for example, or Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. I know I prefer Haruki Murakami and Javier Marias to Stephen King. Maybe he’s justifying his straightforward storytelling with that comment, and I do appreciate his ability to entertain with a book that reads like a film unfolding in vivid technicolor.

But as to the quality of writing, give me an ambiguous novel full of gorgeous language any day.

I may have told you, through my blogging years, how much meaning an analogue life holds for me. Which is an interesting thing to note on a digital format. There is so much pleasure in looking back over one’s day, or week, or month, or years(s). Better than a scrapbook is the Midori Traveler’s Notebook, for it holds a calendar, a journal and photographs; a paper trail of that which is my life.

So why tell you that here? Because as summer draws to a close, and fall is showing up ever increasingly in the darker morning, the bits of red edging the leaves, the ads for Back To School, I suggest this system for you.

My Midori holds my “calendar” as pictured above, but also an insert for the Bible studies I do each day, as well as a commonplace book for the reading I do.

I’ve been thinking about my journals lately, about how long before I began putting words to keyboard I would put them to paper. Even at six years of age I took my little red leather journal with lock and key to Canada, recording every grilled cheese sandwich (and time I saw the Golden Boy), while constantly having my spelling corrected by my grandmother. It daunted me not one bit, for the urge to record what I saw, and what I felt, was far stronger than any reprimand.

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train. ~Oscar Wilde

One of the things I love to read best is my old journals. They are more significant than a scrapbook, able to take me back in time and place better than a photograph. The handwriting on the page, subtly changing as I grew from child to adult, brings me back to the person I was. The life I lived.

For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you’re feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you’re reading. ~May Sarton

Writing a blog is not a substitute for keeping a journal. At least it isn’t for me. When I physically write, with my favorite pen, the thoughts seem to flow with greater alacrity. The inner critic is silenced, for I know the words will not be seen by strangers’ eyes. I am writing purely for myself in my journal, uncensored and uninhibited about expressing vulnerability.

It’s different with a blog. Somehow my writing stiffens up, and pales in comparison with those whose writing I feel is so erudite. It doesn’t flow, it doesn’t even express my self the way my handwritten words do.

Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don’t love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience. ~Sylvia Plath

Yet even a journal is not sacrosanct. Last summer I looked at a whole decade of journals, a box of memories I no longer wanted to remember. The entire carton went into the dumpster at school, and I cared not if mice gnawed the edges should they come across the discarded books. The mice, the rodents, the insects underground had more use for those painful words than I.

Will I live to regret that decision? Is it, as Dodie Smith suggests below, somehow cheating?

I should rather like to tear these last pages out of the book. Shall I? No-a journal ought not to cheat. ~Dodie Smith

As of today I do not regret it. Even though I am not foolish enough to believe that by discarding the journals one can also discard the pain, I know that half of the healing lies in the writing. Keeping the books perhaps, is not quite as important as putting one’s truth into words.

There is, of course, always the personal satisfaction of writing down one’s experiences so they may be saved, caught and pinned under glass, hoarded against the winter of forgetfulness. Time has been cheated a little, at least in one’s own life, and a personal, trivial immortality of an old self assured. And there is another personal satisfaction: that of the people who like to recount their adventures, the diary-keepers, the story-tellers, the letter-writers, a strange race of people who feel half cheated of an experience unless it is retold. It does not really exist until it is put into words. ~Anne Morrow Lindbergh